My Ramblings

I recently came across the Internet History Podcast and I have to say I have been enjoying every minute of it. I love history and especially love content that focuses on recent technology. When I first heard about this podcast I was reminded of Download The True Story of the Internet which was a short series that was on Discovery a few years back. I really enjoyed that series and was disappointed when it was canceled after the 4th episode.

I had the benefit of attending Surge again this year but I have to say that I don't think it met my expectations.  The conference opened up with a keynote from a Forrester research analyst that doesn't like the concept of devops.  Call me crazy but this is probably not someone you want opening a conference with an audience filled with ops and developers.  This point aside the message was less than insightful or even relavant to those topics we are craving at a conference like Surge.  Compared to the previous keynotes (Cantrill/Allspaw and Ben Fried) this was a definite bust.  All-in-all most of the sessions that I attended were interesting but I don't think there were any real takeaways as there were in previous years.  I am definitely questioning whether or not I will be attending next year's conference.

• A career is a journey to become an expert
  • To be truly excellent you must treat it as a craft
  • You must become a craftsman
  • Through experience learn discipline
  • Through practice achieve excellence
• Steps
• Educate yourself
  • Discipline
  • Learn from and share from your peers
  • Be patient because experience takes a lot of time and mistakes
• DevOps is BS because it is incomplete, isolated, and interpreted incorrectly.  What we need is .*Ops
• Everyone in the organization needs an operational mentality including developers so it can be instrumented.
• Operations role has to have expertise in resource planning, monitoring, root cause analysis.
• Developers need expertise in dev but they are not as tactical as ops
• Things just don't work; there is not magical pixy dust.
• Virtualization was the game changer not the cloud.  Provisioning quick is key.
• Provisioning is not operations job.  Managing risk and liability is painless if you skip it.  This is what operations does!  They handle this.
• What you build will break; you can build operational software by having operational thinking.
• A lot of engineers build code that isn't operable.  They don't design their code to introspected and operated.
• Be able to debug it in production because that is where things actually break.
• DevOps needs more ops in dev not the reverse.

Steve Gibson put together some high level podcasts and transcripts on how the Internet works.  It is decent information for anyone trying to grasp the concept of what happens when you open your web browser and navigate to a web site.  Here are some links to the podcasts and transcripts.

How the Internet Works, Part 1 - http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-309.pdf

This year's Surge conference was another good one.  Here are some of my favorite sessions that have been posted online.

Complete playlist on YouTube

I had the benefit of attending the first ever Surge conference a few weeks back in Baltimore, MD.  I didn't really know what to expect but I was hoping for something similar to Velocity but geared more for operations and scale rather than frontend performance.  The event started off with a great keynote by John Allspaw and Bryan Cantrill which unfortuntately hasn't been put online most likely due to the sharing of some war stories of things going real bad.  All-in-all I thought the conference was really good and there were a lot of great sessions that are worth a watch if you have some time.  Here are some of my favorites that did make the cut and got posted online.

Complete playlist on YouTube